Putting David Bowie on The X Factor moment

This week’s shows see the high priest of cool collide with Cowell, the king of
commerce.

Is no song safe from Simon Cowell? On The X Factor this weekend, the finalists debut their annual single, a mass singalong of David Bowie’s cracked anthem “Heroes”, complete with chunky power chords, cheesy orchestra, over-emoting lyric, fist-pumping communal choruses and lots of karaoke vamping: “We can be he-ee-ee-eeeeeeroes!” And it is all in aid of a popular charity (Help For Heroes), so it is almost beyond criticism as it is beyond belief.

In the three decades since Bowie released the song (on his 1977 album of the same name), it has made an unlikely journey from a brittle, wonkily disorientating declaration of defiance in the face of despair to a kind of bellicose anthem of everyman valour. The “we” in the song has become anyone who donates to a good cause and not just the star-crossed lovers Bowie originally imagined meeting beneath the ominous shadows of the Berlin Wall.

There was something anti-heroic about Bowie’s persona when he wrote “Heroes” with experimental boffin Brian Eno. In his early 1970s pomp, he was an otherworldly star, a flamboyant mix of shaman, showman, thinker and singer.

But he slid rapidly towards disaster, almost self-destructing as the cocaine-ravaged, fascist-flirting Thin White Duke. His retreat to Berlin with Eno was an attempt to salvage himself, embracing an icily post-pop synthetic aesthetic that allowed him to investigate personal and political dislocation.

Of course, I’m a rock critic, and I would say something like that. Where the A&R man in Cowell hears a catchy chorus that neatly ties in with his favoured charity, I hear the desperation of a cracked actor trying to rise to the occasion. The song reeks of failure and last chances, the inescapable sense that when the day is over, the singer will be down among the losers where he belongs. It’s there in the sound of the recording, oscillating wildly with Eno’s droning synths and a Robert Fripp guitar riding on a wave of pitch-altering feedback. And it is there in the anxious intensity of Bowie’s vocal, switching from arch deadpan to high-strung screech. I can only imagine what Cowell would say if Bowie was a contestant on The X Factor. “I’m sorry, David. You started out flat, veered wildly off course, panicked when you hit the chorus and ended in hysterics. I’m not sure if I was listening to a song or a car crash.”

“Heroes” (with its distancing quotation marks) was considered weird even in 1977, only reaching number 24 in the UK and failing to chart at all in the US. But you can be sure Cowell’s producers have ironed out all those little sonic glitches, unceremoniously dumped along with ambivalent lyrics about “shame on the other side”. All the better to get to the chorus quicker.

Cowell has been here before, in his appropriation of REM’s Everybody Hurts, Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and the Rolling Stones’s Wild Horses. He has identified an interesting tension that arises from unleashing his flavourless protégés on counter-culture classics, colonising the credibility of artists far too individual and creative to tolerate the crude manipulations and lowest-common-denominator drive of his TV shows.

Bowie himself was largely responsible for his song’s rehabilitation when he performed at Live Aid in 1985 in his lounge-lizard superstar phase, the charitable context (“This is dedicated to all the children of the world”) emphasising the universality of the theme. Since then, it has risen to the status of much covered classic, with versions by Bon Jovi, Oasis, Peter Gabriel and even a choir of Gregorian monks. It is widely used by advertising agencies to add an aura of nobility to everyday activities. Bowie is presumably complicit in the exploitation of his copyright. Semi-retired, he has nothing to lose but his royalties.

The thing about a great song is that it leaves part of itself open for the listener, so you hear what you want to hear. Perhaps Cowell’s endorsement should be taken as the ultimate proof of the maverick greatness of “Heroes”. If it can survive the crass hand of the Karaoke King, it surely deserves the status of masterpiece.